As is known in the art, systems can evaluate threats to be targeted by one or more weapon systems. Known target-weapon pairing systems do not model weapon resource and temporal constraints when suggesting or making allocation decisions. Thus, when multiple threats with overlapping engagement time windows are assigned to a weapon system, there is a possibility that the weapon system may not have sufficient time-critical resources to engage these threats. Even if the weapon system informs the engagement operator about its failure to engage one or more threats and the operator then selects the next ranked weapon system for these threats, this may result in unnecessary delay in engaging threats. In addition, in a battle-space with a large number of threats, there is still a small possibility that the second and even lower ranked weapon system chosen by the operator may run into similar resource limitations. In such a case, some threats may not be addressed.
In a typical battlefield situation at any time, there may be multiple threats headed towards valuable defended assets and multiple weapon systems available to counteract these threats. In battle management, a centralized decision-making process allocates specific threats to specific weapon systems. Such schemes usually begin by predicting the destructive effect of the incoming threat against defended assets. They also consider the effectiveness of the available weapon systems in neutralizing any given threat which include factors such as threat type and time-to-intercept. A typical battle management scheme lists all weapon systems capable of engaging a threat and ranks them based on their effectiveness in neutralizing it. The engagement operator then decides which weapon system to select for a threat based not only on the rank, but additional factors such as weapon inventory and engagement objective. In a battle-space situation with a large number of threats and weapon systems, the engagement operator has to analyze a large number of possible combinations and factors to make the pairing decision. This is further complicated by rapidly changing battle-space situations and could result in delay and poor judgments and decisions. The net result is ineffective battle management that could directly impact the survivability of the defended assets. Thus there is a need for methods that could analyze the vast amount of data and factors to decide the most effective pairing.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,497,169 B1, entitled “Method for Automatic Weapon Allocation and Scheduling Against Attacking Threats,” which is incorporated herein by reference, discloses one such system. While the '169 patent provides weapon-target pairing and launch times for small problem sizes, the disclosed system is relatively slow and may give sub-optimal solutions for larger problem sizes. In addition this approach cannot be applied to the asset survival maximization problem because of the assumption of independence of weapon systems that is true for the threat kill maximization objective. Other previous attempts that utilize static-weapon target allocation are also limited in their solutions.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,404,516 considers scheduling of resources such as weapons, but uses a scheduling method that is relatively slow. U.S. Pat. No. 5,992,288 entitled “Knowledge based automatic threat evaluation and weapon assignment” evaluates threats and, based on trial-intercept calculations, determines which weapon systems can engage it and ranks them based on their effectiveness in neutralizing a threat. The algorithm selects the best weapon to neutralize the threat. No optimization across the battlespace is done.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,511,218, “Connectionist architecture for weapons assignment”, U.S. Pat. No. 5,153,366, “Method for allocating and assigning defensive weapons against attacking weapons,” and the '516 patent; all of which are incorporated herein by reference, are applicable to the static target-weapon pairing problem. However, as discussed above, none of them optimize the deployment or launch time of the weapon system.